Want An iPhone? Don't Go To An Apple Store

Steve Jobs told Arianna Huffington not to bother with the lines at the Apple Store when the iPhone comes out:

“Don’t go to an Apple store,” Jobs told me. “It will be a madhouse there. People will be lined up around the block, sleeping on the sidewalk to get one. Go to an AT&T/Cingular store. Most people don’t know that they will be selling them too.” Uh, they do now, Steve.

If you sleep on the sidewalk in order to buy a cellphone, you may want to consider getting professional help. —MEGHANN MARCO

I had the same impression. Jason Kottke put together a mockup based on the dimensions listed on Apple’s website, which may or may not change your opinion. It seems to be approximately iPod size. But I think it’s tough to judge until you can hold it in person. I still find it hard to tell how big it’s going to “feel,” even with Kottke’s side-by-side comparisons.

Apple made a HUGE mistake when they pre-announced their iPhone. They usually make an announcement a few days before the product is available. Why hype it this time? The iPhone is going to be a hit anyways, so why create the buzz AND a secondary eBay/scumsucking/reseller douche market? I just don’t understand.

Before a cellular phone is made available for sale in the US, it needs to be approved by the FCC. Those FCC filings are public record, along with actual pictures of the phone. Steve Jobs wanted to announce the iPhone before one of the many gadget blog sites announced it on their own. Believe it or not, those guys dig around the FCC site everyday looking for upcoming products to blog about.

@Papercutninja: Their logic was that they wanted to reveal the iPhone dramatically in the typical Apple fashion. The FCC has to do an analysis of cellphones in publicly available reports that often feature pictures, but which are taken in poor lighting in a dull office environment. The avergage consumer might not find this, but places like Gizmodo and Engadget would, and the early adopters would have their first impressions of the device formed by a boring black and white document.

By introducing the iPhone this way, Apple keeps their dramatic introduction, and we get to see the iPhone in the context Jobs prefers.

Don’t worry about the ebayers. There will be some gougers, but the people that pay those prices deserve what they get. The people that rush out to get this will be buying an image, and the more they pay for it, the better story they can tell to the guy in the next cubicle.

The early buyers will get to think that they’re cool, and the ebayers will make a couple bucks. Everybody wins, until the ebayers lose, which will happen immediately after the “look at me, I have slicked-back hair and an iphone” market is saturated.

I mean, if you actually look at the feature set, a Nokia N95 kills it dead in the water, so you’re essentially paying a couple hundred extra for a shiny package that, unlike every other phone on the market, is closed to third party developers.

They’re trading on their reputation, and I’m going to laugh at the image conscious douchebags that mortgage their soul to get one in a way that I wasn’t completely able to with the ipod.